Hi Garvey, I just wanted to thank you for this crust and sauce recipe. I came here looking for the NWI / chicago suburbs tavern pie, specifically my favorite crust in the whole world, House of Pizza in Hammond, Indiana and imagine my surprise when you actually called it out by name in this thread!
That being said, I hadn't realized the dough would need so much proofing initially, so I am only going to have about 26hrs on it for this first attempt. I am currently helping it along a bit out of the fridge, as its starting to smell right, but dinner is in 3 hours so I'm just going to have to go for it.
I made a batch of your sausage yesterday and a small test batch of sauce, and I do have to say, I am super excited about it. I usually use the recipe for La Rosa's sauce (a great resturaunt owned by a great family on Indianapolis Blvd, Hammond from 1979 until 2012) but the Pizza Factory one is so unique compared to that I am super excited to try it.
I will be using a 1/4 baking steel in an electric oven on the middle upper rack, set to bake at 500 for an hour and then turned to broil high once the pizza goes in. I will then let the broiler cool down before doing pizza #2 This seems to produce pretty good results from my research but this will be my first attempt.
I cant get Scamorza cheese out here so I am going to be trying a mix of 50% kraft low moisture whole milk mozzarella, 30% meijer brand unsmoked provolone and 20% cracker barrel sharp white cheddar today, to do something a little different. I know of a couple places that used half whole milk and half part skim, a few that used grande mozz or a blend like this and who knows what Langel's uses... so Im hoping to get close to one of them.
I hope it comes out half as good as the beauties you guys have put up and thanks again for all your hard work, just the thought of a taste of home has me super excited.
